After reading Adam Scheinberg's original article "The Paradox of Choice" and Kevin Russo's response, I want to add my personal comments to this discussion. I will quote Adam and Russo several times and pick up their arguments.

Reading the articles and many of the comments shows me that there are two types of Linux users:
The first group are the Linux "power users". They build their own linux, compile everything on their own, they like to play with their system and they know how to do it. They are the "It works for me, so it's all fine." types.
The other group are the Linux "promoters". They are in a way like the power users but they also want more people to use Linux, people who aren't power users, who don't even know how to compile source code.
The first group is for choice and everything that reduces it is pushed closer to the "windows world" (it's not rare to read comments like "If you don't understand it, use windows" on the internet). But that's the way the second group want's to push Linux. They want Linux to become an OS even for the inexperienced user. That doesn't mean Linux has to become Windows but it should become similarly easy to use.
I don't know if this is a problem, it might as well be a very good thing. Linux is on it's way to become an OS for everyone - at first glance. But under the hood it keeps as flexible as ever, so the geeks can still play around. The trick is to keep the balance and in the best case the two mentioned groups unknowingly keep up this balance.

One last word: I'm quite fed up with this, I dare say, "Windows flaming". The study about Windows getting infected after 17 minutes states that it's about an unpatched Windows. So what? Did you notice the word "unpatched"? If I know there's a secutriy hole, and I know there's a patch for it, it's my own fault when I get infected because of not using the patch. Would you install e.g. an Apache version that includes a known exploit and then whine about being hacked? And who would bother to read an article that claims "Old Linux distros, full of known securtiy leaks and exploits, get hacked minutes after being connected to the net."